Mike Pence's lies to governors about Ohio's Medicaid expansion

When Mike Pence was selected to be Donald Trump's running mate last year, Republican voters who were against Trump saw it as a way to make his campaign more accessible to conservatives. Over the months and well into the Trump presidency, Pence had continued to be seen as the voice of reason from both sides of the aisle when it came to pushing the White House's agenda in Congress. But the fact is that Vice President Pence has shown himself to be similar to Trump in the way he pushes the White House's agenda forward, using misinformation and lies.

Pence misleads on Ohio's Medicaid expansion

It was reported for instance that while in Rhode Island last weekend, Mike Pence criticized Ohio Governor John Kasich when the Vice President lied about the problems with the state's Medicaid expansion. Vice President Pence said he imagined that Gov. Kasich would be troubled to know that 60,000 disabled people in Ohio were on waiting lists and left without care for months and even years due to Governor Kasich's expansion of Medicaid. Kasich was not in Rhode Island this year for the National Governors Association where Pence made his pitch this year. But his communications office, @KeelingOHIO, responded on Twitter saying that the Vice President's claims were "bogus."

In the tweet, the spokesman said that those claims by Mike Pence had been fact-checked twice and that those people who were on waiting lists had nothing to do with the state's expansion of Medicaid.

He said that those on waiting lists were related to home and community-based services. The Vice President's claim was of the view that there were too many able-bodied people on Medicaid which left out those with disabilities who need it. This fits with the overall conservative view that people who don't need assistance, take advantage of government subsidized programs.

Misleading and lying to 'win'

At the same time, others who represented the administration who was also at the same National Governors Association were telling states to ignore scores from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). Those scores estimate that the health care bill the Senate was trying to pass would take $722 billion dollars away from those states that would help them expand Medicaid for low-income Americans.

Governor Kasich has been viewed by many far-right Republicans as not staying on message with them over health care, which is likely the reason why Mike Pence called him out at the event.

In fact, in an interview on Real Time with Bill Maher earlier this year, Kasich said that government health care was the solution to get people covered than he was all for it. He admitted then that it was an unpopular position for him to take. This was not the first time that Mike Pence has deliberately distorted fact-checked information for the administration. Before Donald Trump's inauguration, Mike Pence was on ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos where he continued to use the already debunked story that millions of illegal immigrants had been bused in to vote during the election.

When he was cornered, he finally admitted - rather subtly - that the President would continue to push his position, regardless. Here is that interview to show the extent of the administration's ability to mislead.